And suddenly, just like that, we’re already onto Issue 6 of the Error Logs. That’s 6 months of pure, unfiltered glitchy goodness. Thanks very much for sticking around and reading it each month. I hope it’s been educational, or at the very least mildly entertaining.

I guess I should do something special to mark the occasion, so I’ll be giving some big discounts on my art, looking at some of best glitch art album covers, and then rounding it off with a mini tutorial on hex editing.

News & Updates

If you cast your mind back to last month’s issue where I introduced Notepad++ glitching, I’ve been playing around with the broken JPEG style to make a series of broken sculptures.

These statues have lasted hundreds or sometimes even thousands of years. They’ve survived though wars and natural disasters, yet they’re still here for us to enjoy. I was looking back through some of my old Facebook photos, and the compression has gotten so bad as Meta compression methods have had their way with them.

But it’s not just about the integrity of the files. During my research for this Issue’s Glitch Art Album Cover feature, I was struck with how difficult some of the research was. There were quite a few artists from the 70s/80s that had minimal information on them. Even some of the more recent artists suffered from expired websites, broken links etc. I think it just goes to show how volatile digital information can still be, and how if we don’t advocate for ourselves when it comes to archiving that work, we leave our legacies to the mercy of time.

Commissions

So this is the big news for this month. I’m now open for commissions, so if you need an artist for album/branding/packaging and would like to commission me to make some artwork from scratch, let me know.

If you need something glitch, vaporwave, synthwave, cyberpunk, body horror, then you can submit a commission request through my website.

PFP Glitches

Need a new Profile Pic? Maybe Your Tindr profile isn’t getting enough attention. Maybe you’re getting bullied by 12 year olds on Fortnite. You need to make a statement, and I’m here to help with my profile pic glitches.

The usual price is $10 per photo, but for lucky readers of this newsletter, I’m doing them for $5 per photo (make sure you read ‘til the end to find out how to get one)

Glitch Feature: Glitchy Album Covers

As this is a special edition of the Error Logs, I wanted to do something a bit different (as if all the offers weren’t enough). So, to celebrate me finally being able to do album commissions, I’d like to share some glitch art album covers by famous musicians that I’ve come across.

Now this list isn’t ‘the best glitch art album covers’, or the ‘the best albums with glitch art’. It’s just a collection of albums with glitch art. I also tried to keep it to albums I’d seen out in the wild and remembered from memory, rather than just finding someone else list and ripping it off.

Public Image Ltd. - Second Edition

Artist: Public Image Ltd.

Album: Second Edition

Year: 1979

Cover Artist: Tony McGee

Standout Song: Death Disco

Post-Punk is one of my favorite genres of music - It was this really exciting time where it felt like anything was possible. Bands were breaking free of the limitations of punk and experimenting with different sounds, which I guess is the reason why it’s such a hard genre to pin down. There were a lot of different things happening, some of which eventually became completely new genres, and other things that were just so unique and stand alone in their differentness.

PiL were at the forefront of that experimentation, and their second album, Second Edition (or Metal Box as its also known) is full of angular stabby guitars, dub influenced bass, ranting vocals, and bits of Swan Lake.

The vinyl was originally released on a limited run inside a metal box, similar to the canisters that film reels come in. But it's not Metal Box that I want to talk about today, but instead the artwork for the second issue of the albums which came in a more standard sleeve format.

The cover is a distorted portrait of the guitarist, Keith Levene. It reminds me a lot of the photocopy slitscans or a funhouse mirror. Today, it’s pretty easy to get this kind of effect using something like Glitch Lab, but would have been much harder back then.

According to Levene, in an interview he did with Perfect Sound Forever in 2001, the distortions were achieved by photographing reflections of their faces in water and compositing the results.

During a time when album covers were usually the name of the band with a lovely picture of them that their mums would like (Throbbing Gristle excluded), this felt like something different.

The cover is a brilliant representation of the sound inside. Stark, distorted, experimental. 

Ryuichi Sakamoto - async

Artist: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Album: async

Year: 2017

Cover Artist: Shiro Takatani

Standout Song: andata

Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote this album after recovering from throat cancer in 2015, thinking it would be his last. It’s an album that meshes well with glitch art. Sakamoto’s main goal was to create an album that didn’t synchronize; Like speaking a language that doesn’t exist.

He wanted to make something that was musical, but where its sounds never come together to make a proper harmony. He likened the sounds to human viewpoints, and while they may not always be harmonious, their existence has meaning.

The cover of the album, designed by Shiro Takatani, shows some potted plants with a pixel stretch effect applied to the right side of the image. By itself, the cover itself is a little uninspiring, but the work was meant as a much bigger piece.

The album was reinterpreted as an audio-visual experience in collaboration with Takatani, entitled “async-immersion 2023”. The installation replicated the async nature of the album by playing the music alongside the ambient noises of the venue, and wide-screen, pixel-stretched visuals of nature and instruments from Sakamoto’s studio.

The idea was that the music and visuals were not synched, but designed to work together so that no two performances were the same.

Here you can see a photo from the Kyoto Shimbun Building where the installation is held

There don’t seem to be many videos online of the exhibition, but there’s a short YouTube video here.

I’d also recommend checking out Takatani’s Toposcan works, that have similar effects.

The KVB: Artefacts

Artist: The KVB

Album: Artefacts

Year: 2023

Cover Artist: Kat Day

Standout Song: Pictures of Matchstick Men

The KVB is a contemporary post-punk duo made up of Nicholas Wood and Kat Day. But The KVB is not just an auditory experience, as Day is also responsible for all the amazing visuals of the band.

Artefacts is a covers album of 60s psychedelia that has been given a goth makeover.

The album cover shows a distorted image of a man on a beach. The colors of the beach and the sky have an almost hallucinatory collage effect, which is distorted by waves, almost like a film reel slipping out of the aperture plate.

I’m not sure how the effect was achieved, but my guess is that it was with some form of slitscan photography, possibly made by distorting the image as it was scanned by moving the photograph as it is captured, or with some other kind of digital magic (as an aside, I always do my slitscan work in Processing).

Definitely check out the video for Pictures of Matchstick Men as it also features a great glitchy video, also directed by Day, that features a really cool double exposures effect where video synthesizer glitches are superimposed over the duo as they play on the moors.

If you want to see more of The KVB’s artwork, check out their Instagram. Day seems to have a wide range of influences and she’s not afraid to try many different styles of work. Her love of stark architecture fits the mood of the band well (which is one of the things that made Artefacts really interesting as it was a little different from previous outings).

If you’re looking for something of a glitchy bent, check the cover for the EP Out Of Body, as well as the videos for On My Skin and World On Fire, which seems to take the work of Nam June Paik and reinvents it for a post 9/11, rolling news cycle world.

Herbie Hancock: Magic Windows

Artist: Herbie Hancock

Album: Magic Windows

Year: 1981

Cover Artist: David Ross / Howard Gutstadt

Standout Song: The Twilight Clone

This was another cover that I struggled to find much info on. The first major problem I hit was who is actually responsible for this work. Some sites just list David Ross, but other sites also list Howard Gutstadt alongside him. Neither have much web presence, but from what I can guess, David Ross was responsible for the art direction of the album and concept, but it was actually Howard Gutstadt that made the image.

This was further reinforced when I found this image that employes similar effects that Gutstadt entered into an exhibition called the SIGGRAPH ’82 Art Show, which was a show to celebrate electronic technology in art.

After doing a bit of research, it seems like Gutstadt led many lives; he was an activist that advocated for community video, he was a Marketing Manager at a video animation and computer animation software company, and he was also an accomplished artist himself.

He was one of the early adopters of video synthesizers, and there’s a really interesting interview from a couple years back where he talks about his video synthesizer work (around the 1hr mark in the video). He has also had his work displayed at the Tokyo Budokan; projected onto a giant pyramid as part of a musical performance (as you can see in this clip from Japanese news).

According to info I found online, he was a part of some the first video art collectives in NYC and Nam June Paik even joined some of the collective’s meetings.

Back to the cover itself - It’s curious because I always thought this kind of repeating effect was inspired by error messages like you find in Windows, but this album cover predates windows based operating systems by quite a few years. I’m assuming that the repeating effect was created with some kind of video synthesizer. I’d love to see the original video from this shoot.

Nine Inch Nails: The Slip

Artist: Nine Inch Nails

Album: The Slip

Year: 2008

Cover Artist: Rob Sheridan

Standout Song: Head Down

I’m not going to spend much time writing about this album cover today, mostly because I really want to write a separate article another time about Rob Sheridan’s work.

So I won’t spend any time talking about the amazing minimalist logos that represented each song on the album and were embedded into the MP3s, or all the videos he directed for the album.

I will just say that the cover is a fantastic bit of glitch art that combines old school photography techniques with a cool paper collage glitch effect that was inspired by Polish graphic design for the 1980s.

Rob Sheridan has probably been one of the biggest inspirations for current glitch artists, so if you’re not familiar with his work, be sure to check it out.

The Alan Parsons Project: Pyramid

Artist: The Alan Parsons Project

Album: Pyramid

Year: 1978

Cover Artist: Hipgnosis (Design), Rob Brimson (Photographer)

Standout Song: Hyper Gamma Spaces

The next album on the list is from prog rock band, the Alan Parsons Project. The album, Pyramids, is a concept album about the mysticism of the pyramids in Giza.

There’s not a lot of information that I can find out online about this album cover. All I know is that it was designed by famous design studio Hipgnosis (famous for all those Pink Floyd covers)

The full artwork shows a gentleman (Alan Parsons) waking up in a room, presumably in Giza if I’m to believe the scene outside the window. The inside and outside of the room is drenched in orange, which is contrasted by the blue image on the TV and the blue aura emanating from Alan Parsons.

There’s a book in the background by American New Age Author Patrick Flanagan, who wrote a lot about Pyramidology and pyramid power. He believed that the pyramids act as “an effective resonator of randomly polarized microwave signals which can be converted into electrical energy”. Seems like he knew his stuff.

Anyway, I think we’re supposed to presume the aura was caused by the pyramids, possibly be the aforementioned randomly polarized microwave signals, which has plagued travelers to Cairo since ancient times and has made travel insurance to Cairo almost impossible to buy except for the richest of explorers.

By today’s standards, I don’t think the artwork holds up very well, but I was really surprised to see something with a frequency modulation looking effect being made in the 70s. Especially considering that it’s a composite image and would have been made way before photoshop was a thing. Technically, it’s very impressive for the time.

Peaches: Rub

Artist: Peaches

Album: Rub

Year: 2015

Cover Artist: Daria Marchik

Standout Song: Dumb Fuck

The first time I saw this album cover was on a list of ‘ugly album covers’ which I think simultaneously misses the point of the artwork while also proving much of what Peaches has been making music about for the last 20+ years.

The cover has her posing wearing dark makeup and with her mouth glitched, distorted and repeated into something of a glitch body horror.

According to Peaches herself in an interview she did with WBUR-FM, she wanted to avoid doing something glamorous and instead do something striking. The repeating mouths showing that we can’t shut her up and that she won’t look pretty for us.

Which is one of the reasons why I think glitch art and Peaches is kind of a match made in heaven. Peaches has always been about making art that shines a light on how so much music by female pop singers is made for the male gaze. It subverts that by trying to normalize the normal which has somehow become corrupted and is now seen as undesirable. She confronts the audience with things that make them uncomfortable that really shouldn’t be uncomfortable or disgusting, and in turn pokes fun at it. Glitch art, by its very nature has always been about changing or subverting one thing to another, so it’s not surprising that the genre has had a long history with marginalized or subjugated groups.

I can’t find out much about the artist of this work, but it seems to be by an artist called Daria Marchik, a Russian Visual Artist and Photographer (not be confused with a make-up artist with the same name) based in the US. Unfortunately, her website doesn’t appear to be working so there’s not a lot of her work that seems to be available online. I’ve managed to find a couple of works that might be hers that seem to employ mirrors and glitchy channel swaps to create some cool results.

Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel

Artist: Peter Gabriel

Album: Peter Gabriel (AKA Peter Gabriel 3: Melt)

Year: 1980

Cover Artist: Storm Thorgerson (Hipgnosis)

Standout Song: Intruder

According to the cover’s designer (and winner of the badass name award 1980) Storm Thorgerson, the effect was achieved by manipulating the photos from a Polaroid camera as they were developing.

Here’s the original ‘melted’ polaroid before any further editing was done.

And here’s another one from the series that was used for the cover of the song “No Self Control”

This stuff is fascinating, and I’m surprised we don’t see more of it. I would have thought that second image was made through prosthetics if I didn’t already know how it was made.

According to Gabriel, “There was a photographer called Les Krims, who discovered that if you take a Polaroid and you squash it you can get the colors to run, and we used to go after them with different objects and sort of burnt matches and coins and fingers and all sorts of things and it was a lot of fun ‘cause you had to get the timing right but you got some wonderful effects out of the distortions”.

According to Krims, he used a Polaroid SX-70 because it was still possible to move the wet film emulsion around for a few hours after the photo had printed. I’ve done some research, and it seems it’s still possible to buy a Polaroid SX-70 (both new and refurbished) and its film (which isn’t cheap), but I’m not sure if it’s possible to achieve the same effect.

I think it’s also worth sharing the work Lucas Samaras, another artists from the 1970s that was employing the same technique. His Photo Transformation series of self portraits from 1973-1974 are something else.

Tool: Hex Editing

In last month’s Error Logs, I introduced databending using Notepad++. This time around I’m going to talk about use hex editors to glitch your images. It runs on a similar concept; you open the image up in a hex editor and it displays the data of the image as a bunch of gibberish, but rather than text like with the Notepad++ glitches, it’s a bunch of hexadecimal values.

Actually, it’s not strictly true that there’s no text. Most Hex editors will display both the hexadecimal values and the ASCII equivalents.

There are tons of hex editors out there, but personally, I use Super Hex Editor (other hex editors are available)

So the idea is that each hexadecimal number represents a byte in the data of the image, so changing each byte can result in a change.

The way in which you manipulate the data is very similar to how you make glitches with the Notepad++ method I wrote about last month, so if you haven’t read that, check it out.

If you did read, you’ll remember the main methods were copying and pasting chunks of data into different places, adding or deleting data, or the “find and replace” method. Databending with a hex editor is no different.

Actually, the resulting images are pretty similar, so I don’t want spend too much time retreading over familiar ground, but I will show you some of the results. After that I want to get into some different file formats that I didn’t talk about with the Notepad++ article.

So for this round of tests, I’ll be using one of my trusty friends as base image

So first let’s just take a look at what happens when you mess around with JPEGs. Here’s what happens when you overwrite some of the data by writing some words over the ASCII characters

Here are the results

Like with Notepad++ glitches, different programs encode/decode things differently so you get slightly different results

One thing that I read while I was doing some research is that you can get more interesting results if you compress the JPEG first. So here are some experiments after opening the JPEG up in GIMP and re-saving it as 70% quality.

As soon as you can open in up in the hex editor you can see where the compression has happened as that data is now represented by 00s

Here’s an example and it does seem to be the case that it gives a more aggressive glitch.

Anyway, so far things seem to be pretty much the same as they were with the Notepad++ glitches, so I thought I would try out some different file formats keep things fresh.

So again, using our marble friend, here are some other file formats and how they respond to playing with the data in a hex editor.

So seeing as last time we also played with bitmap files, let’s see what happens when we change some of the data in a bitmap. This was after going through and randomly changing some of the hex values and doing a find and replace.

So it seems like bitmap files are quite resilient. The most interesting thing I got was that line to the right of the face above the right shoulder

Looks like a lost concept artwork for New Order’s Blue Monday.

Determined to get some kind of result, I copied and pasted the Wikipedia article for New Order’s Blue Monday over the ASCII data in the hex editor

Here’s the resulting glitch.

Again, not that interesting, but it made me realize that when you convert to bitmap, each pixel is represented in order by the hexadecimal values in the hex editor. So, in effect, I guess I was changing the color each pixel as it was interpreting them as hex color codes. That would explain why

1. the wall of text was so large when I opened it in the hex editor, and

2. why there were so parts of the image that were just 00 00 00 00 00 even though I hadn’t compressed anything - this was representing the black parts of the image.

So overall, bitmap images aren’t that interesting in a hex editor, but I bet you could so some cool things with smaller images similar to this

Here’s a Find and Replace that I did on a GIF which produces some interesting effects. It doesn’t change much with the color channels, but does seem to create some crazy distortions.

I also tried it out with the JPEG2000 file format, which produces quite a lot of artifacting and almost makes this dirty, cloudy effect.

It’s hard to see from the image, but if you zoom in on the artifacts, it almost gives it this canvas, woven look to it

I don’t know if Photoshop has the option to save files in the JPEG2000 file format, but GIMP only allows you to open JPEG2000 files. The easiest way I found to save files as JPEG2000 is to use a program called Darktable, which is a program used by photographers to edit raw images. HOWEVER, word of warning, do not open your glitched JPEG2000s in Darktable - It will crash and brick the program meaning you will have to reinstall it.

Honestly, glitching JPEG200 files doesn’t really seem worth effort as they don’t look very interesting and they’re a massive pain in the arse to deal with. If there are any artists out there doing work with JPEG2000s, I salute you and your willingness to inflict pain upon yourself.

Anyway, that brings us on to the gold of this article. I recently discovered .HEIC glitches

It was my first time hearing about the .HEIC format, but apparently it’s the default format across apple devices.

The resulting glitches you can make when you hex edit .HEIC files are absolutely beautiful - colorful and full of artifacting. They’re like a mix of the glitches you get from JPEGs and WEBP files. Honestly, they may be my favorite glitches outside of GLIC.

Here’s a zoomed in look:

So. here’s what our friend looks like after a good ol’ hex editing.

It creates some absolutely amazing glitches. And if you play around with changing different parts, you can end up with something that works well with the original image like in the example above.

But the beauty comes when you start blending it back into the original image like this,

Then, after some magic, you end up with a finished work that looks something like this.

I’ve only really scratched the surface with .HEIC glitches, but I’m sure I’ll be sharing some of my works in the next newsletter!

6 month birthday Special Offers

As promised, to celebrate the 6 month birthday of the Error Logs, I want to share some happiness. Sorry, the cake all went as you were reading the newsletter, but here are some pretty big discounts on my art.

Cellphone Wallpapers discounts

All Cellphone wallpaper packs now $1.

4 wallpapers in each pack.

That’s an 80% discount until midnight Monday June 3 (Japan time)

If it prompts you to enter a code, type in the code NOMAD

INPRNT Discounts

Did you know I sell Fine Art prints?

For lucky readers of this newsletter, you can now get a 25% discount on:

Art prints, mini prints, posters, canvas prints, acrylic prints, metal prints, and card packs.

That means a standard 4×4 art print will cost you $11.25 instead of $15

Use this code at checkout: SCL8JDQ8

The offer runs from today until June 3

PFP Glitches

So I already talked about these earlier in the newsletter. I’m giving a 50% discount for one week only to people who read this newsletter.

I will glitch your face for $5

If it asks you for a discount code, type in the code NOMAD2

Offer ends on June 3.

And that’s the end of this Issue. Thanks for sticking round and supporting me.

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